Monday, 25 April 2011

Quick update on KDE Telepathy Contact List - now with groups, too!

Just a very quick update on things inside Contact List. One of the major missing features before KDE Telepathy (yes, we still have no cool project name..ideas?) release can be made is groupping support in contact list. I've been working on this for the past few days and I'm proud to announce - Groups are working! Oh yes and that's not all. We support cross-account groups, that means, that the account the contact belongs to really does not matter. Just think groups. You can also have one contact in multiple groups (though there's currently no GUI way how to do that).

This is not yet in master as it is still bit like a minefield currently, but I'm so excited about this that I had to share :) It's getting really close now. I also hope that after some discussion with Collabora guys I can have this model included in Telepathy-Qt4-Yell project, which host various models (and we are already using the AccountsModel in Cotnact List) which will hopefully one day get merged back into Telepathy-Qt4 master.

As pictures say more than thousand words, behold...

I'll post a longer blogpost about all the new fancy things we're working on after the groups are all finished (this is a priority #1 now). So stay tuned.

By the way, the historicaly first release of KDE Telepathy is really imminent now ;)

15 Comments

I want to congratulate you for the awesome job you have done with the telepathy contact list. I have a quick question about the application: will/does it use the system tray? Currently, I have to start it each time when I need to access my contacts and close it when I don't need it. Ideally, I'd prefer to be able to start it from the presence applet, so that I don't have duplicate icons in the tray. Thanks again and keep the good work!

mind you, I'm happy for telepathy integration. And Kopete isn't entirely stable... Nor extremely easy to use. So I'm not at all negative about the efforts being put in here. I just wonder if there is not more room for re-use of code and functionality?? re-inventing the wheel and re-creating all of kopete's good UI points to avoid the few pitfalls (not that many, the UI you seem to be building looks pretty familiar to Kopete) seems a bit wastefull.

@Todd
"Ideally, I'd prefer to be able to start it from the presence applet, so that I don't have duplicate icons in the tray. Thanks again and keep the good work!"

We're doing that.

@Dimitar, Venky
RE: Akonadi.
There are plans, they've been there since the project started. However they've been holding the project up, so it's being 'postponed' from the first release.
This may help explain the overall plan/goals: http://grundleborg.wordpress.com/category/telepathy/

@Blog
Using Kopete code directly is very difficult, it's very tied into the backend they had, which we need to replace. By the time we've swapped it out to use telepathy we'll have spent so much time we may as well have rewritten it, and we end up with messier code from having gone through conversions.

Right now, nothing in the UI is fixed, there's lots of good/new ideas floating around, and all crossed with a sense of "let's get something released" so people can see what we're going for.

Animations:
Yeah, that'd be cool.

Auto hiding/resizing:
I think we have that

Plugins:
This is an interesting one. Telepathy itself makes a lot of plugins redundant. If someone wanted to do web-presence, they can hook into telepathy directly and find out your status. There's no point building it into the contact list.

The other plugins you mention are actually about the chat interface rather than the contact list - and even though it will act seemlessly this is a completely separate application.

Join our Mailing List, I would be very interested in hearing what plugins/features people actually use, and working out what we can do to accommodate these needs. Though the answer will almost certainly be "not in the first release"

The hard part that Martin's post is covering is taking all the information from telepathy and building a Qt Model which is grouped by the groups on the remote contacts. With this in place, and proper model->view code, rewriting the UI is comparatively easy.

To expand a little on the reply for @Blog - I personally hate the Kopete GUI. It looks like file manager and not a contact list. So no, I won't use its tree-structure-look with folders and all. *THAT* looks (IMO) terrible. As for the rest - there are plenty of planned features, but given its +- 3 months long development, you can't expect everything to be in there already :)

As David already pointed out, the hard work is being done "under the hood" (ie. the models), creating the views (or changing the GUI) is then really easy and there can even be whole bunch of them and you could switch between them in the runtime. Now we just need someone to actually write the code (hint hint) ;)

Also, please do join our Mailing List (kde-telepathy at kde dot org) and let us know your using habbits, what you'd like to see and what not. Just don't say we want Kopete :P

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is: will there be support for "meta-contacts" like Pidgin does? I mean, I have a few people in both my Google Talk and MSN contact list, can is there a way to manually merge them and only have them show up as one contact in the list?

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A development continuing to the KDE Telepathy contact lists. It is not merge to rewrite. I like to make one thing to clear. KDE is communication software to people to people.
It is good communication with network.

I've perused a lot of info on KDE Telepathy, however, it would be helpful if you, or anyone reading, could clarify:

1) how meta-contacts (will) work?

Some of us have numerous services for a single contact, would prefer to operate on contact-centric and service-neutral basis. I.e. If I'm contacting Suzy Lee I'm not particularly bothered whether she's on Skype or GaduGadu, just whether she's online, and I'll message her. The same goes for logs which should ideally be contact-centric.

2) is there an intention that contacts and their related data (nicknames, usernames, statuses, avatars, call and chat logs) be syncable within KDE/beyond (via Nepomuk/Akonadi), and if so what progress?

@Storm - simple answer is - Yes, both are planned. Kind of anyway. Metacontacts will be done via Nepomuk and this integration is on its way already. We're not exactly sure how it will be implemented on the UI level, but the idea is to not care about the IM network, just like you said. Which kind of answers the second question as well. We will use Nepomuk for most of the things and I'll also work on GSoC project to get IM and Akonadi connected (though it will be quite simpler than that).

The state of Nepomuk-Telepathy library is a work-in-progress and should be finished sometime in the summer.